clair015

So, I have been running a little experiment on twitter. Oh well, it doesn’t really deserve the term “experiment” – at least in an academic vocabulary – because there certainly are no treatment effects or control groups. It does deserve the term “little” though, because there are only four observations. My experiment was to post a few recent findings from academic research that some might find mildly controversial or – as it turns out – offending. These four hair raising findings were 1) selling junk food in schools does not lead to increased obesity, 2) family-friendly workplace practices do not improve firm performance (although they do not decrease them either), 3) girls take longer to heal from concussions, 4) firms headed up by CEOs with broader faces show higher profitability. Only mildly controversial I’d say, and only to some. I was just curious to see what reactions it would trigger. Because I have noticed in the past that people seem inclined to dismiss academic evidence if ...

In the field of strategy, we always make a big thing out of differentiation: we tell firms that they have to do something different in the market place, and offer customers a unique value proposition. Ideas around product differentiation, value innovation, and whole Blue Oceans are devoted to it. But we also can’t deny that in many industries – if not most industries – firms more or less do the same thing. Whether you take supermarkets, investment banks, airlines, or auditors, what you get as a customer is highly similar across firms. 1. Ability to execute: What may be the case, is that despite doing pretty much the same thing, following the same strategy, there can be substantial differences between the firms in terms of their profitability. The reason can lie in execution: some firms have obtained capabilities that enable them to implement and hence profit from the strategy better than others. For example, Sainsbury’s supermarkets really aren’t all that different from Tesco’s, offer...